


The Who Does Matter

by yourlibrarian



Series: Fanfic Genres [11]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fandom - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Real Person Fiction
Genre: F/M, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 20:04:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13488777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: I don't believe I've ever written my own "Why Slash?" post, however two things prompted this one.  The first was an interesting post which took on the topic and offered an explanation I hadn't yet seen.  And the second was that the topic's Fanlore entry points out "while no equivalent existential soul-searching exists for "why het"."  It was that second part that seemed to me the key issue. I don't think that slash is that different from het in the bigger picture.  Rather there is a larger question of why we writewhowe write that is at the heart of it at all.





	The Who Does Matter

I don't believe I've ever written my own ["Why Slash?"](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Why_Slash) post, largely I think because all the ones I read either fit with what I saw or felt to be true myself, or because they offered interesting insights into what might be true for others. Certainly what's linked at the above Fanlore entry is only meant to represent a few takes on this very common meta topic (which has been written both by fans -- and even non-fans in the media -- for years). 

However two things prompted this one. The first was an interesting post [by peasant](https://peasant.dreamwidth.org/357180.html) which took on the topic and offered an explanation I hadn't yet seen. That led us to further discuss things in a way that led me to this essay. And the second was that in that Fanlore post it mentions "while no equivalent existential soul-searching exists for "why het"." It was that second part that seemed to me the key issue.

There's a quick and simple explanation for it of course: all societies are heteronormative so while there have been many treatises over the centuries on the nature of love, if there have been those wondering "why" we're all so het then I've missed them. 

But what emerged for me in my responses to peasant is that I realized that slash is not actually different from het in the bigger picture. (And, as another commenter pointed out, what is true for slash ought to also apply to femslash after all). Rather, there is a larger question of why we write _who_ we write that is at the heart of it all.

### Why Slash?

To start with, these were my initial responses about slash creation generally. (And while I may sometimes say and mean "writing" I think this is also true of fan art, fan vids, etc. and I don't think that should be overlooked for some very important reasons I will come to later). I responded to peasant's discussion of leadership in groups by agreeing that I did think leadership roles had something to do with it. However, this holds true for _all_ ships, not just slash ones. I also agreed that slash was about more than just sex and particular body parts, because if it wasn't there wouldn't be much reason to write stories going past 10 pages. While there is plenty of PWP out there, there are also extremely long and beloved slash stories in every fandom.

Also while I believe that the central reason for liking slash varies for each woman (and might change over time), the Fanlore entry is again correct when stating "being a slasher is a question of identity and self-definition for some slash readers." There have been suggestions and surveys which pursue the idea that while femslash fandom might obviously be populated largely by LGBT creators that the same is true of slash fandom even if those creators identify as women. However this then raises the same old question posed to straight women, which is "why would you want romantic texts without women in them?" 

Speaking as a straight woman, I think that the relatability of female characters has a lot to do with that, as well as the cultural scripts that those women are often made to follow. For me personally, I've found that the hottest scenes are exactly the het scenes with a relatable female character. But I find the relatability issue to be a big problem. A lot of female characters are not good stand-ins for me, which is why I've been almost universally disappointed by published het romances. I find the female characters enormously irritating in the way that they don't react in the least as I would expect (or would do). I also have a hard time ignoring the real world consequences of their behavior because I have lived life as a woman. But having a male character in exactly the same role lessens the irritation because I don't see him as a stand-in (though I may still not think much of the plot). For me, slash works better in distancing me from the text and allowing me to choose who to identify with. The fact that many older romance novels were not written from the male POV or had very few sections in which we saw his POV at all certainly contributed to this unease because there was only ever one character to identify with.

But my own biggest reason for liking slash, which has already been written about elsewhere, is because the way the lead character relates to other male characters, usually a particular character, is often quite different than the way they relate to female characters in the story, particularly characters that are there to be "the love interest" or to generate UST. This may even be true in stories with a lead female character or in which a romance is central, although it is more obviously true in stories where there are few female characters, which remains most stories told in movies and TV, if not books. 

Particularly in adventure or procedural stories, the lead character and his work partner or lieutenant-type often have the most central relationship on a show, one which is often at the center of the action, and one in which both are respected in their roles. Even when that male character is a bit of a lower status sidekick their relationship is liable to be many sided -- comedic, concerned, intimate in their knowledge of one another, and committed in the sense that men in a foxhole are. This is less true for love interest characters ([as I explored here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6721450)). And while those characters could be rewritten, it's easier to work with something already there and which one already likes.

That last example about foxholes was deliberate. Even today the number of situations in which men and women share the exact same experiences in the same job are limited. Two men will almost always be on a more equal footing than a man and a woman, whereas for an opposite sex couple there will always be something unknowable about the other's experience. And what some slash readers are very attracted to are symbiosis and equality. There's the assumption that no one will understand a man better than another man, and that if he already cares about this man _without_ sex or sexual attraction involved, then when it is added it is not likely to detract from that equality. Two men can be equal in a way that a man and a woman can't because there is no place on earth where the culture is not biased against women and in favor of men. This is even more true in particular scenarios or historical settings. I recently read a Victorian slash novel in which the two men have class differences but are working together to resolve a case. Needless to say a woman, regardless of class, would be very restricted in what she could do or where she could be seen.

Not only that but when it does come to the sex scenes, things can be done between two men which, were it done to a woman, the act would seem threatening, potentially misogynistic, or just off-putting.

In short, as Buffy once said, "It's about power." Or in the case of slash, the negotiation of it. I recently read a slash mystery novel where the central rift between the established couple was the fact that the lead character was very headstrong, independent and impetuous in his work life, but with his romantic partner he preferred to be dominated in bed. Since he feared his partner would carry that over to their work collaborations as well as their life together outside the bedroom, he would take offense to anything he found to be an intrusion on his independence or work decisions. It's possible a similarly headstrong woman would do the same, but the cultural script for her would already be different. There would be little dichotomy seen between submission in the bedroom and competence in the workplace -- officially. 

Yet one of the reasons women continue to struggle for respect in professional fields _does_ go back to the idea of women's "natural" submissiveness in sexual and social situations. Many women do struggle to breach this expectation whereas men have either been allowed to or even strongly encouraged to assert themselves since they were boys. These cultural scripts lead many people (both men and women) to see them as inferior to men in terms of assertiveness, leadership, and strength. So it makes that script particularly obvious if we look at what happens to a man in what is usually a woman's dilemma. He understands the cultural script that assumes that any show of submission is proof of an underlying weakness, and that it therefore creates a vaccuum that someone else can or should step into. So it becomes something he defends against in no uncertain terms even though it is that very defensiveness that is causing a rift in his relationship. He assumes there's a threat even though he has never explicitly discussed his fears with his partner. It's possible that a man and a woman would also have such a conversation, but between two men it almost becomes required because their roles have not been laid down in a particular pattern over and over again.

Fans also have two tropes that tend to work against a het couple. They loathe infidelity and they are very attracted to "soul mate" type bonds. The trouble is that people have to work. So unless they work in the same office or run a business together, they will have commitments other than to the beloved, and important ones at that. So if the two partners are also work partners, things tend to gel well as they are rarely away from one another and there are not whole parts of one another's lives that they're at a remove from or don't really "get."

### The Center of Attention

I mentioned earlier the issue of leadership and how that factors into fan pairings. I think that the key thing is that the top pairings in any fandom tend to involve the lead character (or one of them if it is a multi-lead story). So in Buffy, for example, the top pairings are Buffy with Angel or Spike or Faith; Angel and Spike; as well as Spike and Xander. In the last, one could consider either Spike or Xander the lead male character on Buffy, particularly after S3. So I think that the lead character(s)' relationship is always a big attraction to viewers or readers, and unless that character is a woman or a show which centers on a romantic pairing, the closest character to that person is often another man. So this certainly is one reason why slash always appears.

And canon does have a lot to do with how popular a character or ship becomes depending on how much time is spent on them. A while back I [looked at the numbers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6697273) for certain characters in the MCU. Larger roles helped characters considerably in being included or being the central characters in fanworks over time.

Peasant suggested that what gets people to write RP pairings is unintentional compared to canon and that there is no clearly defined "leader" in RP scenarios the way there is in fictional stories. For the _most part_ that's true in that whatever attracts RP writers to a real life pairing would be less deliberate than what happens between characters in a canon work. Even if creators aren't intending for two characters to seem shippy together, they _are_ intending for characters to exist in a certain way or to serve certain purposes. All characters in a fictional canon are created for specific reasons (this is particularly true in a live action canon where every person who appears or speaks incurs an additional expense). Yet two people who are interacting in a public setting are much less likely to be doing so for a single purpose or to convey a particular thing. They exist independent of any specific purpose.

But I do think that there is some deliberately created RP canon out there, and there are also cases where the leads in a project (such as the lead singer in a band) could have the same connotation of "leader" that a main character has in a fictional story. The most obvious kind is the public interactions between people who are actually in a relationship or who, for whatever reason, want to have it believed that they are. This is also true for slash ships. For example, these days there are boy bands and the like who have deliberately created "texts" where they play with an attraction among one another because they know that there are fans who will latch on to it. There is also playacting and teasing done among stars, or simple cases of friendly affection, without realizing how that can be interpreted. Most would acknowledge that the RPF canon in SPN was fed enormously by the interaction of its co-stars.

Even as popular as that RP fandom and others have been though, unless the fandom's canon is RP to begin with, RPF of any kind is far less common than canon work in that fandom. We can look at SPN again as an example. It's had RPS work from the fandom's early days and a lot of it, complete with its own fests and fandom circles. But it's still only 10% the size of SPN canon fanworks at AO3. There's certainly a large group of people who hate RP fanworks and thus don't take part in it, especially if there is a fictional canon that can be worked with. This unease limits the size of the fandom and number of works. However, I'd argue that the RP side of any canon will also be smaller because it's not _as central_ a text. The actual actors are, in the end, secondary to their characters in terms of visibility and emphasis. (In fact, depending on the actor, they may be enormously private unless discussing their work, and their work only, in interviews and public appearances). So that returns us to the issue of the center of attention being a draw for fanworks.

However, the interesting issue then becomes why rarepair ships exist at all, especially among characters who have never or barely met. In those cases there _isn't_ anything there that can explain the pairing -- this is particularly obvious in crossovers. I remember once being baffled by the many pairings (het, femslash, and slash) which would get written with no clear basis at all. One can look at, say, the very diverse set of pairings found [in Buffyverse Top 5 recs](https://buffyversetop5.livejournal.com/tag/) or the many varied pairings found in a canon's fandom tags on AO3. My personal explanation for this is that it's done for one of three reasons but it has its roots in cloaked Real Person work.

### The Role of Interpretation

The first reason is the "advanced writer/reader" scenario. People who are immersed in creative fandom and are very accustomed to the way fanworks can break any boundary become interested less in the canon than in particular characters, or stories they would like to see those characters playing out. So they either write them or request them in challenges and exchanges. In some cases such stories could be considered "fixit" type work. So we might see a writer/reader dissatisfied with any potential canon pairing for their favorite character in fandom A because they just don't like or aren't into the other characters. Maybe they have a different favorite character in fandom B that they'd love to see paired together with character A. Or in other cases maybe character X has very little storyline and no romantic interests, and the writer/reader wants to see them get one, so they bring that character front and center. They might pair them with another minor character or one of the leads whom that character has barely interacted with. 

So the first reason has a specific desire behind it which does have a sort of canon explanation, in that a fan's interest in a particular character or characters leads them to want to see larger or different storylines for them. But I'd say this desire is rooted less in the portrayal of a character so much as the character type, since it's hard to suggest that a character who has 3 lines an episode or across episodes is particularly riveting as a character. The fan may simply like the actors involved. So what's motivating that rare pair is an RP interest rather than anything the canon kicked up. 

But there's a second reason often tangled with this, in that a fan may have a particular archetype of character (or relationship) that they like to see expressed over and over, and they will latch on to particular characters even if they barely exist in the text. In many cases this is because the character is seen as a sort of "blank slate" onto which particular characterizations can be made and stories acted out. The character doesn't have to be a minor character for this to happen either. I think we've all seen wildly OOC stories written where it's clear the actual character is being molded to fit a story of the writer's preference. But in cases where there's very little characterization to work with or where we have nothing on which to base a potential pairing because there's no interaction in canon, it's more clearly a case of the author's preference for particular archetypes or "ur stories" coming to the fore.

But there's also a third explanation which is the "writing exercise." This is another case of "advanced writer" scenario in which an author may not be invested in a particular character or pairing at all but is either fulfilling someone else's prompt or simply wants to be challenged to write a believable story with next to no canon basis. The point then is not some trigger from canon but simply an experimental desire to see "can this be done?" 

But here's where I go back to the issue of fan art and vids as opposed to fan writing. In her essay [Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance](https://books.google.com/books?id=UgZsi_DOKoQC&pg=PA229#v=onepage&q&f=false), Francesca Coppa points out how fanworks really grow when a canon becomes visualized -- think Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. She suggests that fanworks are better seen as a form of theater rather than textual works. I would agree and I think that certain fan practices such as dream casts (often offered as a way to race or gender swap casts, though certainly used more generally) as well as AU RP works suggest that what fans are often doing is using actors' bodies to portray stories of their own choosing, much as they might be cast in a show or play. This can be seen in fan vids, particularly those with a constructed reality or AU storylines, but it's also apparent in fan art which offers an embodiment of the pairing we can't otherwise get.

But the bodies are only one half of the equation -- the other is the particular story that is told. And that's where I think the "who" comes in. Because the real who is the reader/viewer or writer. People see the same story differently, and while there are often big clumps of similar interpretations, ultimately everyone sees a story through the lens of their own personal experiences and biases which focus their attention on certain things, and sometimes even "fill in the gaps" in a way which doesn't actually exist in the text.

This "filling in" can get complicated in live action canons because even though writers may discover things in their texts that they didn't realize were there until someone else points them out, when it comes to live action work there are any number of hands who are putting their own interpretations (or who are missing things in the text which _should_ have been there) into what we see. Actors have their own views of characters as well as wanting to portray themselves, as actors or people, in a certain way. Directors may not see certain things on screen or may want to create things in the moment that weren't in the text. Editors strongly shape how we interpret scenes or actions, so do musical composers, etc. Even choices by hair and makeup or wardrobe people can distract our attention about what is going on, or make us wonder what we're supposed to assume in a given scene. For example, is this person supposed to be considered attractive/unattractive in the text? Is this person supposed to be trying too hard/revealing internal problems? 

But ultimately I think what many of us do when consuming texts is write another story over the bones of a text, even if we may not think we're "creating" anything at all. It lies in the way we react to things and to people who are presented; in the ways they do or don't satisfy us in what we believe or what we want to see; in the ways they fit with or clash with other texts we're presented with in our past or in our surroundings; in the way that we think this story will be received by others; in how engaged or bored we are in terms of the story's familiarity or novelty; and in who we think ourselves to be and what choices we see ourselves offered for action or control within a text. And my own response when I see a slash story, especially ones which I perceive as using close canon interpretations of characters, is to feel I am being given more options for action or control in that text by choosing my point of identification, and also seeing familiar stories acted out in a slightly different way with different consequences. 

### The Who in the Equation

Returning to the issue of "leadership," I find this to be of particular interest with some kinds of rare pairings or crossover pairings. For example, while in most fandoms my main ship has been a central or at least popular pairing in the fandom, in the MCU it is actually [a rare pair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6697177) with almost no direct canon interaction. And what I've discovered I find interesting about it is that it challenges both of the characters in a way they are not within their storylines so far. Similarly, I could see the appeal of certain crossover pairings, particularly among "leader" types of each canon because they may not truly have an "equal" within their own text with which to be so challenged. And as a reader I am particularly attracted to stories that not only require some kind of partnership, but which also require negotiation of that partnership to discover where and how each person fits in the dynamic (which is why my favorite stories are threesomes, but these are very rarely written in any depth in most fandoms). 

So while I agree that the reason slash appeals to people varies by each person, I think that is equally true of each het, femslash, and gen text. The "who we are" matters as does the "who we want to see" in those texts, whether canon or fanwork.


End file.
